A troubling question for so many today is, “How did the United States, the most successful and advanced nation in history, fall into the current state of decline so rapidly?” The easy answer, which absolves people from responsibility, is that decline is an inevitable law of history, with most empires not lasting more than two or two and a half centuries. The United States will be 250 years old in 2026.

However, Americans are generally not fatalists. Far better is it to understand what’s going on and do something about it. First, it is essential to recognize that America is different from all other nations in human history because its foundation revolves around the God-given right of freedom, which is one of the most important natural rights. That right of freedom, when protected and fully realized, enables people to maximize their creativity, solve the most difficult problems, and flourish.

The founding documents of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were revolutionary in establishing for the first time in human history that the primary purpose of government was to protect and defend freedom and other natural rights of the nation’s citizens. The tradition of natural rights that lay behind the Constitution assured people of a range of unalienable rights, the most fundamental of which are articulated in the first 10 amendments, also known as the Bill of Rights.

The First Amendment is the most important because it protects all the other rights — a cornerstone that provides a self-correcting means for both the public and the private sector to function properly. What is essential about the First Amendment is that freedom of speech and thought are absolutely necessary for a society to arrive at the truth of facts, what works and solves problems, and what is right and what is wrong. Americans now have a front-row seat to congressional investigations and are relearning that freedom of speech is the primary weapon to expose and destroy lies and deceit.

The primary cause of our current state of decline is that we have allowed so many liars and deceivers to gain power and influence in society. And until recently, we the people have had limited success in exposing their frauds and false narratives and holding them accountable.

The deceivers’ primary method of operation is creating and using propaganda that often starts with a kernel of truth that gets manipulated and spun to create false narratives that are believable. In fact, these narratives — often created by parties and agencies working within and around government — are generally designed to facilitate hidden agendas of corruption by the deflection of a broadly appealing narrative that holds the masses through groupthink.

It is hard to say exactly when the federal government violated the First Amendment in stepping over the line in propagandizing the American people. But we now know that the CIA engaged in a large-scale program, known as “Operation Mockingbird,” in the early years of the Cold War for the purpose of manipulating domestic and foreign news media organizations for propaganda purposes. Operation Mockingbird recruited leading American journalists into a propaganda network that enlisted and paid some 400 journalists and involved 25 large organizations, which were secretly conducting assignments for the CIA.

Being discovered decades after it began, Operation Mockingbird was never formally closed. So it should come as no surprise that the scope of media manipulation by government agencies became an “industrial scale” operation. We learned through the Twitter Files and the reporting from Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger that government agencies such as the DOJ, FBI, CIA, State Department, DHS, CDC, and FDA have enlisted all the Big Tech social media and information search companies to support various narratives that have included:

• blocking the Hunter Biden laptop and its incriminating information on the Biden family — an action that directly interfered with the 2020 election;

• blocking coverage and scientific reports of benefits of therapeutic drugs to protect the pathway for approval of emergency use authorization vaccinations as the only preventive for COVID-19;

• blocking stories that make the case that vote fraud is a problem;

• supporting the view that the southern border is secure;

• supporting the climate change scare and need for a Green New Deal;

• supporting Ukraine with massive aid, even while the United States runs a simultaneous $1.5 trillion budget deficit.

It is imperative to remember that the First Amendment is based on the principle that no person or institution, including government, has a monopoly on the truth. Furthermore, the suppression or control of speech and expression is unconstitutional and threatening to the Republic. No nation can survive when its government deceives and corrupts its people, denying them the ability to make good political and economic choices. Similarly, when a nation’s justice system becomes politically weaponized, the moral compass of equal justice under the law is destroyed.

However, the recent temporary restraining order by U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty in Louisiana that bars a slew of government agencies and more than a dozen top officials from communicating with social media companies for “the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech under the First Amendment” is encouraging. We should expect a final court ruling to make this restraining order permanent.

Americans are now waking up to the endless hoaxes and lies that have gone down for decades. And with the staggering level of corruption in the Biden family being exposed, we are surely close to a tipping point exposing corruption in the Obama White House, in whose administration Joe Biden served as vice president for eight years. In the first year, 2009, Hunter Biden cofounded investment fund Rosemont Seneca Partners with Christopher Heinz, stepson of Obama’s future Secretary of State John Kerry, and Devon Archer, the former Kerry advisor who just testified in Congress that Joe Biden participated in all his son’s pay-to-play/bribery business dealings.

In sum, it turns out that the First Amendment really is the cornerstone holding up the United States. It is the bright light that exposes our darkest scandals and facilitates solutions to seemingly intractable problems.